Category: Aquaculture

  • Rotifer Culturing at Home: Continous Cultures

    Rotifer Culturing at Home: Continuous Culture Set-Up and Protocol Growing rotifers as a continuous culture is easy to do, but requires a small amount of work, almost every day. Unlike batch culturing, where the goal is to culture the most rotifers possible in sequential batches, the goal of continuous rotifer culturing is to create a…

  • How to Culture Rotifers: Batch Culturing Protocol

    Culturing rotifers at home is fairly easy to do.  Rotifers are a great food source for newly hatched fish larvae and for some filter-feeding invertebrates.  Ironically, the rotifer organism itself provides very little nutritional value to the animals that eat them. It is the content of their guts (the food they eat) that provides nutrition.  As…

  • Rotifer Batch Cultures

    Rotifer Batch Cultures Culturing rotifers with a batch culture technique is akin to a manufacturing process.  Instead of focusing on creating a stable environment to keep a relatively low-density culture thriving over a long period of time, the objective of a batch-produced culture is to maximize the yield of the culture over a short period…

  • Rotifer Cultures: Continuous Rotifer Culture and Production

    Rotifer Cultures: Continuous Rotifer Culture and Production There are two popular methods of culturing rotifers—continuous culturing and batch culturing.  Each method has its own pros and cons, but the next two posts should help you decide which method is right for you.  The focus of this article is to describe the process of continuously culturing…

  • Equipment Needed to Culture Saltwater Rotifers

    Equipment Needed to Culture Saltwater Rotifers

    The first step to culturing saltwater rotifers at home is to obtain a starter culture.  If you can’t find a hobbyist (or breeder) growing rotifers locally, you can find them online—just type ‘rotifer cultures’ or ‘live rotifers’ into the GOOGLE search bar on the bottom left margin of this page, and you’ll find a number of…

  • Culturing Saltwater Rotifers–Introduction

    Culturing rotifers is easy to do at home. In order to get started, you have to obtain a starter culture. If you don’t find automatic success with your homegrown rotifer culture, don’t worry. It took me a few weeks (and several crashed cultures) to get the hang of it. If you decide to try this on…

  • Dosing Phytoplankton

    Dosing Phytoplankton

    Phytoplankton are small photosynthetic organisms considered to be one of the building blocks at the base of the coral reef food chain.  Many filter-feeding invertebrates depend on phytoplankton as a significant source of nourishment. Within the saltwater reef tank, however, phytoplankton are generally not present in abundant numbers.  As a result, advanced aquarists often dose this valuable living food…